Locking wheel nut removal in Worthing

One of today's jobs was to remove the locking wheel nuts on a Renault Megane in Worthing. The customer did not actually own the car, he was a mechanic getting the car prepared for an MOT. He had checked the tyres and found that three of them needed to be changed; he went to remove the lock nuts using the removal socket only to find that the nuts had been greatly over tightened he tried removing them using an air gun only to find that this broke the removal socket. (These were McGard lock nuts, which if you read the instructions with them, say "Do not use an air gun", they must be removed using a hand wrench).

For those of you that don't know, McGard nuts are the ones with a little flower type pattern on the surface, (see photo) and they often have a hardened surface and a rotating collar, making them one of the most difficult lock nuts to remove. But they are also one of the weakest if not treated with care. We at Hometyre remove them and replace them by hand using a wheel brace.

I could see from the marks on the surface of the locknut that someone had tried to remove them using a cold chisel, without much success. I checked the other normal nuts on the car to find that they were all extremely tight, meaning that this was going to be a difficult job.

I setup our specialist tool with the appropriate head for the McGard nuts, and got to work, after around 5 minutes of hammering the tool it had still not moved the nut. Time for a change of tactics…. I got out my trolley jack and used it to support the tool, this way I could put a foot on the tool to hold it in place and use two hands on the hammer to get more force. This did the trick as after a few more blows the nut came free. It was then onto the next wheel to repeat the process until all the lock nuts had been removed. I then went back round the car, undoing all of the normal nuts and then re-tightening them to the correct torque settings.

We do not have replacement nuts for the ones we have removed as there are too many different sizes, lengths, threads and types for us to carry. We suggest that you go to an auto accessory shop and get replacements once we are finished.

Being a mechanic, the customer did not need us to replace the worn tyres as he was doing this himself, so the job was completed. I made up the invoice and took a payment from the customer using our debit card machine and sent him a vat receipt by email.

Should you have lost or broken your locking wheel nut removal socket, then give us a call at Hometyre, we are professionals and have a variety of specialist tools to remove the lock nuts without damaging your alloy wheels. I have removed over 200 lock nuts since 2013 and until now in 2015 I have had a 100% success rate.

Should you also need us to replace any of your tyres, then let us know as we can bring them along and change them for you once the lock nuts are off.

I have had a few customers who have been quoted up to £400 just to have one lock nut removed at a main dealer, and other customers who were quoted a minimum of two hours labour at garage rates but the cost can go higher if they have trouble removing the nuts.